Birmingham International Airport handled 984,245 passengers during September, an increase of 1.5% over the previous year.

Peter Vella, the airport’s Business Development Director, said: “This again re-affirms the reputation of Birmingham Airport as the region’s gateway to the world. "With the Airport celebrating its busiest ever month in August and with a number of exciting new routes launching in the coming weeks and months, there has never been a better time for people to fly from their local airport.”

The figures are made up of 687,139 scheduled passengers and 297,106 charter passengers spread across the two passenger terminals.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that European air passengers will be offered even fewer flights in the last part of this year than originally announced, due to the deepening financial crisis.

And the expected growth in the number of flights and plane seats available on transatlantic routes is not now going to happen, according to figures from travel information company OAG.

In August, OAG's analysis showed the number of flights within Europe would fall 2.7% between October and December 2008 compared with the same period last year, while the number of seats on offer would go down 2.8%.

Today, OAG said that the flight figure would fall even further - to 5.0%, while seats would drop 5.6%.

The company added that its latest information indicated that capacity on transatlantic routes in the last three months of this year, which had been announced as growing by 2.0% in August, would actually fall 2.9%.

Overall, the world's airlines will offer 6.1% fewer flights between October and December than the same period last year, with the actual number of flights decreasing by 451,000, with 46.3 million fewer seats being offered.